Last updated: February 14, 2026
Here's a question that comes up in almost every PPC strategy conversation and almost never gets a straight answer: should you be running Microsoft Ads alongside Google Ads?
The honest answer is that it depends. But not in the vague, wishy-washy way most articles cop out with. There are specific, measurable situations where Microsoft Ads is absolutely worth your time and money, and there are equally specific situations where it's a distraction that fragments your budget and doubles your workload for minimal return.
This guide breaks down exactly when to advertise on both platforms, when to stick with Google alone, and how to think about cross-platform management in 2026 without losing your mind (or your margins).
Let's start with the data everyone throws around but few people properly interpret.
Google dominates global search with approximately 90% market share across all devices. In the United States, that figure sits around 85%, with Google processing over 8.5 billion searches daily worldwide. When people think "search advertising," they think Google. That's not going to change in 2026.
Microsoft's Bing holds roughly 4% of the global search market across all devices. That sounds tiny. But the number is misleading for three reasons.
First, Bing's market share on desktop is dramatically higher than its all-device average, sitting at roughly 12% globally and close to 17% in the United States. Most B2B purchasing decisions still happen on desktop computers in office environments, which is exactly where Bing's default browser integrations (Microsoft Edge, Windows search bar) give it an outsized presence.
Second, the Microsoft Advertising network extends far beyond Bing.com. Your ads also appear on Yahoo, AOL, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, MSN, Outlook, and throughout the Microsoft Edge browser ecosystem. When you factor in these partner networks, Microsoft Advertising powers roughly 25% of all US desktop searches. That's not a rounding error. That's a quarter of your desktop addressable market.
Third, Bing's user base is growing. The search engine reached an all-time high US market share of roughly 8.8% across all devices in early 2026, up from around 7.5% in mid-2025. The integration of AI-powered Copilot features has driven over 100 million daily active users to the platform, and Microsoft has invested more than $14 billion in OpenAI to accelerate this growth. The trajectory is clearly upward.
So the market share argument isn't really "90% vs 4%." For advertisers targeting US desktop users, particularly in professional and B2B contexts, it's more like "76% vs 17%." And that 17% represents a substantial audience you're completely invisible to if you only run Google Ads.
The most important thing about Microsoft Ads isn't the volume. It's who's searching.
Bing's user demographics have a distinct profile that makes the platform disproportionately valuable for certain verticals and almost irrelevant for others.
Roughly 48% of Bing users fall within the top 25% of household incomes in the United States. Compare that to Google's more evenly distributed income profile, and you start to see why certain high-value industries perform exceptionally well on Microsoft Ads.
The largest age group on Bing is 25 to 34, followed by 35 to 44. Despite a common misconception that Bing skews heavily toward older users, Microsoft's own data indicates that 73% of users are under 45. What is true is that Bing over-indexes on desktop usage during business hours, which correlates strongly with professional and B2B search behaviour.
About 54% of Bing users are married and 59% have children. The user base has a stronger representation in white-collar and professional sectors, with 29% working in white-collar industries. And here's the stat that matters most for B2B advertisers: 23% of business executives report preferring Bing over Google for professional searches, and Bing usage increases by 15% during working hours compared to evenings.
This demographic profile creates a clear pattern: Bing is disproportionately valuable for reaching affluent professionals making considered purchasing decisions, particularly during business hours on desktop devices.
Based on the demographic data and platform characteristics, there are several scenarios where not running Microsoft Ads is genuinely leaving money on the table.
This is Microsoft Ads' single biggest competitive advantage. Because Microsoft owns LinkedIn, Microsoft Advertising offers the ability to target users based on LinkedIn profile data, including job title, company name, industry, and seniority level. No other search advertising platform offers this.
If you're selling enterprise software, professional services, consulting, SaaS tools, or anything where the buyer's job title matters, LinkedIn profile targeting on Microsoft Ads can be transformative. You can bid higher for searches from C-suite executives at companies with 500+ employees, or exclude junior roles who might click but never have purchasing authority. This kind of targeting simply doesn't exist on Google.
The legal vertical has some of the highest CPCs on Google, routinely exceeding $50 per click in competitive practice areas like personal injury, criminal defence, and family law. Microsoft Ads CPCs in legal are typically 30 to 50% lower for comparable keywords. Bing's higher-income user demographic also aligns well with clients who can afford premium legal representation. Many successful law firms run profitable Microsoft Ads campaigns that would be cost-prohibitive on Google.
Similar to legal: extremely competitive on Google, but Bing's affluent, desktop-heavy user base is precisely the demographic that searches for financial advisors, investment platforms, mortgage products, and insurance policies. CPCs are meaningfully lower, and the audience quality often matches or exceeds what you'd find on Google for these verticals.
Microsoft has invested specifically in healthcare advertising, launching Doctor and Clinic Ads in open beta across the US, UK, Australia, France, Germany, and India. Bing's older-skewing desktop audience correlates with healthcare decision-makers who are researching providers, treatments, and facilities. The lower competition also means your healthcare ads have better visibility at lower cost.
If your Google Search campaigns are already capturing 90%+ impression share on your core keywords and you're looking for incremental volume, Microsoft Ads is the most natural expansion. The query intent is identical (people searching for the same things), the campaign structure can be imported directly, and you're reaching the 17% of desktop searchers who simply don't use Google.
Honesty matters more than enthusiasm, and there are clear situations where Microsoft Ads won't deliver meaningful results.
Bing holds less than 1% of global mobile search market share. If your product or service is purchased primarily on mobile devices, Microsoft Ads will deliver negligible volume. Most DTC ecommerce, food delivery, ride-sharing, mobile gaming, and youth-oriented consumer brands fall into this category.
Bing's market share drops precipitously outside of its strongest markets. In most European countries (excluding the UK), Asia (excluding China, where Bing has a uniquely strong position), Latin America, and Africa, Bing's share is under 3%. The volume simply isn't there to justify the management overhead.
At very low budget levels, splitting spend across two platforms means neither gets enough data to optimise effectively. Smart Bidding on Google needs conversion volume to learn, and spreading a thin budget across two platforms starves both algorithms of the data they need. If you're working with a limited budget, concentrate it on Google first, maximise your results there, and expand to Microsoft only when you've exhausted profitable Google volume.
Google Ads is significantly ahead of Microsoft in AI-powered campaign features. AI Max for Search, sophisticated Smart Bidding with auction-time signals, Performance Max's cross-channel automation, and Demand Gen's visual advertising capabilities are all either unavailable or less mature on Microsoft's platform. Microsoft Advertising has introduced its own Performance Max campaigns (with Google reporting a 32% CPA reduction for Microsoft PMax), but the depth of automation still lags behind Google's ecosystem.
One of the most consistently cited advantages of Microsoft Ads is lower cost per click. The data supports this, but with important nuances.
Industry benchmarks across all verticals show that Microsoft Ads CPCs are typically 30 to 50% lower than Google Ads for equivalent keywords. The average CPC across Microsoft Ads sits around $1.54, compared to roughly $2.69 on Google. That's a significant difference, and it's driven by one simple factor: less competition. Microsoft Ads campaigns face approximately 36% less competition than Google Ads, which means fewer advertisers bidding on the same keywords, which means lower prices for those who do bid.
But lower CPC doesn't automatically mean better ROI. You also need to look at conversion rates and conversion quality.
The average conversion rate across Microsoft Ads is approximately 2.94%, compared to Google's average of 4.40% on the Search network. So while you're paying less per click, you're also converting fewer of those clicks into customers. The net efficiency depends entirely on your specific vertical, offer, and audience.
The general pattern works out as follows: you'll pay less per click on Microsoft, you'll get fewer conversions per 100 clicks, but your cost per acquisition may still be competitive with or better than Google because the CPC savings more than offset the lower conversion rate. This is particularly true in high-CPC verticals (legal, finance, insurance, B2B software) where the CPC difference can be hundreds of percentage points.
The only way to know for certain is to test. But the data strongly suggests that for most advertisers spending more than $3,000 per month on Google Ads in eligible verticals, a Microsoft Ads test is worth running.
Microsoft Ads makes it easy to import campaigns directly from Google Ads. You can literally click a button and replicate your entire Google account structure, keywords, ads, and bid strategies in minutes. This convenience is both a feature and a trap.
The import function is a fantastic starting point. But treating it as a finished product is one of the most common mistakes advertisers make on Microsoft Ads. The platforms differ enough that imported campaigns need significant adaptation.
Audience behaviour differs between platforms. Bing users convert differently, often with longer consideration cycles and higher desktop usage. Your Google bid strategies won't automatically translate. Match type behaviour has subtle differences. While both platforms use similar match type categories, the way they interpret query intent can vary, meaning your negative keyword lists need platform-specific refinement.
Ad formats and assets have differences. Not all Google Ads features are available on Microsoft. Certain asset types, targeting options, and campaign features either work differently or don't exist. You need to audit your imported campaigns and adjust for these gaps.
Bidding data doesn't transfer. Even if you import campaign structure and keywords, your Google Smart Bidding models don't carry over. Microsoft's algorithms need to learn from scratch using their own data, which means your imported campaigns will go through a learning phase and may perform poorly initially until the system has enough conversion data to optimise.
The right approach is to import as a foundation, then adapt. Review your search terms reports on Microsoft specifically, build Microsoft-native negative keyword lists, adjust bids based on Microsoft's competitive landscape (not Google's), and give the platform 4 to 6 weeks to accumulate its own performance data before making judgements.
Here's the part of the Microsoft Ads conversation that doesn't get enough attention. Even if Microsoft Ads is profitable for your business, running campaigns on two platforms creates genuine operational challenges.
You now have two sets of campaigns to monitor, two sets of search terms to review, two sets of bids to adjust, two sets of negative keywords to maintain, two sets of reports to analyse, and two dashboards to check. If you're also running Performance Max, Demand Gen, Shopping, and multiple Search campaign variants on Google, adding Microsoft Ads on top means you're managing campaigns across a dizzying array of campaign types, platforms, and bidding strategies simultaneously.
For agencies managing multiple clients, this complexity multiplies further. Every client with both platforms needs duplicate effort across every optimisation task.
The practical result is that most advertisers who run Microsoft Ads don't give it the attention it deserves. They import from Google, maybe check in once a week, and let it run semi-neglected. This is better than nothing, but it means Microsoft Ads never reaches its full potential. The campaigns slowly drift out of optimisation, wasting budget on queries that should have been negated weeks ago and missing bid adjustments that would have improved efficiency.
This management burden is the single biggest argument against running Microsoft Ads for many businesses. Not because the platform isn't profitable, but because the human bandwidth to manage it properly doesn't exist.
If you do decide to run both platforms, the next question is how to split your budget. And this is genuinely difficult to get right manually.
The naive approach is to allocate based on market share: if Google has 85% of search volume, give it 85% of your budget. But this ignores the efficiency differences between platforms. If your CPA on Microsoft Ads is 40% lower than Google, you should be shifting more budget to Microsoft, not less, until the marginal efficiency equalises.
The sophisticated approach is to allocate based on marginal return. Put each next dollar into whichever platform will generate the most profit from that dollar. In theory, you'd shift budget from Google to Microsoft whenever Microsoft's marginal CPA drops below Google's, and shift back when it rises above.
In practice, this is nearly impossible to execute manually. The marginal return on each platform shifts constantly based on time of day, day of week, competitive activity, seasonality, and dozens of other factors. A human manager making weekly budget allocation decisions is always working with outdated data.
This is exactly the kind of cross-platform optimisation challenge that autonomous AI is built to solve. A system that monitors performance across both Google and Microsoft simultaneously, in real time, can shift budget between platforms based on where the highest marginal profit exists at any given moment. Not once a week. Not once a day. Continuously.
groas currently specialises in Google Ads, where it provides autonomous AI management that continuously optimises campaigns for profit. The same principles that make groas effective on Google, including real-time bid adjustments, dynamic budget allocation, automated negative keyword management, and continuous Quality Score optimisation, are equally applicable to cross-platform management. As the PPC landscape evolves toward multi-platform complexity, the case for autonomous management that spans both Google and Microsoft becomes stronger with every additional campaign type, platform, and variable that enters the equation.
One factor that makes 2026 different from previous years in the Microsoft Ads conversation is the role of AI. Microsoft's investment in OpenAI and the integration of Copilot across the Bing ecosystem is meaningfully changing how people interact with search on Microsoft's platform.
Over 33 million people actively use Copilot as of 2025. AI-powered responses are used in approximately 34% of all Bing queries, compared to about 19% for Google's AI features. This higher rate of AI engagement on Bing means that Microsoft Ads is adapting to serve ads within and alongside AI-generated conversational responses.
For advertisers, this creates both opportunity and uncertainty. The opportunity is that Bing's AI features are attracting new users to the platform (the 100 million daily active user milestone was directly driven by AI), expanding the addressable audience. The uncertainty is that AI-powered search may change how users interact with ads, potentially affecting click-through rates and conversion paths in ways that are still being understood.
What's clear is that Microsoft is investing aggressively in making its search platform AI-native, and advertisers who establish a presence on Microsoft Ads now will be better positioned to benefit from this growth than those who wait.
Rather than giving you a blanket "yes" or "no," here's how to decide whether Microsoft Ads belongs in your strategy this year.
Your target audience includes B2B buyers, professionals, or high-income consumers. You're in legal, financial services, healthcare, insurance, SaaS, or professional services. Your Google Ads spend exceeds $3,000 per month and your core campaigns have strong impression share. Your customers primarily research and purchase on desktop. You're advertising in the US, UK, Canada, or Australia. Your Google CPCs are high enough that even a 30% reduction would meaningfully improve profitability.
Your audience is primarily mobile-first and under 30. You're targeting markets where Bing has negligible share. Your total PPC budget is under $1,500 per month. You need advanced automation features (AI Max, sophisticated PMax) that Microsoft hasn't matched yet. You don't have the management bandwidth to properly run and optimise a second platform.
Even if you decide that Microsoft Ads isn't right for your business today, the trajectory is clear. Search is becoming a multi-platform landscape. Bing's market share is growing. AI-powered search is fragmenting the market. And the advertisers who will win in 2027 and beyond are the ones building cross-platform capabilities now.
This means investing in campaign management infrastructure that can scale across platforms. It means building creative and audience strategies that are platform-agnostic. And it means adopting autonomous AI management that can eventually handle both Google and Microsoft simultaneously, optimising budget allocation across platforms in real time based on where the profit opportunity is greatest at any given moment. groas represents this future of advertising management, where the complexity of multi-platform, multi-campaign PPC is handled by AI that's aligned with your profit targets, not by humans frantically switching between browser tabs.
What is Microsoft Ads' market share in 2026?
Globally, Bing holds approximately 4% of the search market across all devices. In the United States, that figure is roughly 8.8% across all devices and approximately 17% on desktop. When including partner networks (Yahoo, AOL, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia), Microsoft Advertising powers about 25% of US desktop searches. Bing's market share has been growing steadily, reaching all-time highs in 2025 and 2026, driven by AI integration through Copilot and continued investment from Microsoft.
Are Microsoft Ads cheaper than Google Ads?
Yes, on average. Microsoft Ads CPCs are typically 30 to 50% lower than Google Ads for equivalent keywords, with an average CPC of approximately $1.54 versus $2.69 on Google. Microsoft Ads campaigns also face about 36% less competition. However, conversion rates on Microsoft Ads average 2.94% compared to Google's 4.40%, so the net cost per acquisition depends on your specific vertical and audience.
Can I import my Google Ads campaigns to Microsoft Ads?
Yes. Microsoft Ads offers a direct import feature that replicates your Google Ads campaigns, including keywords, ads, and settings. However, imported campaigns need adaptation. Bidding strategies don't transfer, match type interpretation differs slightly, some Google features aren't available on Microsoft, and the platform needs 4 to 6 weeks to build its own performance data. Treat the import as a starting point, not a finished strategy.
What is LinkedIn profile targeting on Microsoft Ads?
Because Microsoft owns LinkedIn, Microsoft Advertising uniquely allows advertisers to target users based on LinkedIn data, including job title, company name, industry, company size, and seniority. This is available for Search and Audience campaigns. It is the single most distinctive targeting feature Microsoft Ads offers and makes the platform especially valuable for B2B advertisers.
Which industries perform best on Microsoft Ads?
Legal services, financial services, insurance, healthcare, B2B software, professional services, and education consistently perform well on Microsoft Ads. These verticals benefit from Bing's higher-income user base, desktop-heavy search behaviour, and lower CPCs compared to Google's fiercely competitive auction environment.
Is it worth running both Google Ads and Microsoft Ads?
For most advertisers spending over $3,000 per month on Google Ads and targeting US, UK, Canadian, or Australian audiences, yes. Microsoft Ads provides access to users you're completely invisible to on Google alone, often at lower CPCs. The main challenge is management bandwidth. Running both platforms doubles the optimisation workload, which is why autonomous AI management that can handle cross-platform optimisation simultaneously is increasingly the most practical approach.
How does groas help with cross-platform advertising?
groas currently specialises in autonomous Google Ads management, continuously optimising campaigns for profit 24/7. The same AI-driven approach to bid management, budget allocation, negative keyword optimisation, and performance monitoring applies to cross-platform scenarios. As PPC complexity grows with more campaign types and platforms, groas represents the future of advertising management where AI handles the tactical execution across every platform while humans focus on strategy and creative direction.
How is AI changing Microsoft Ads in 2026?
Microsoft's integration of AI through Copilot (powered by a $14 billion+ investment in OpenAI) is driving significant growth in Bing usage. Over 100 million people use Bing daily, and AI-powered responses appear in approximately 34% of all Bing queries. Microsoft Ads is adapting to serve ads alongside conversational AI results, creating new placement opportunities. Bing's market share growth in 2025 and 2026 is directly correlated with this AI investment.
